Midwifery is hard work.
Mothering is hard work.
Combining midwifery and mothering is really hard work.
At the age of 21, I started work in the world of midwifery. I was a midwife assistant in a busy planned home birth practice. I saw various midwives trying to balance the demands of children and demands of pregnant/laboring/birthing/postpartum clients. I saw that sometimes the child won, and sometimes the client won. But when torn between the two, the midwife hardly ever won.
At age 24, I got pregnant (surprise!) and gave birth to my beloved son Jonas. For the next two years, my work in midwifery (and my nursing education) took back seat to baby tending. At the age of 30 and 31, I again gave birth, and again I stepped away from midwifery for a couple of years.
Mothering an infant or small child is hard work. Physically, emotionally, socially, intellectually, spiritually -on every level, those early years of mothering is really hard work. Personally, I like to work and I loved the hard work of early mothering (except for the times when I wanted to curl up and die, or at least sleep for four solid, undisturbed hours). My personal choice was to spend the first two years of my children’s’ lives working primarily as their mother.
When I was finally a midwife, graduated, certified and licensed, I only looked for jobs where I would be one of three or four midwives in a hospital based practice. As a new midwife with small children, I specifically looked for jobs where I would be the kind of midwife that I as a pregnant woman would NOT have chosen.
For ten years I worked hard as a midwife, on call a third of the time, catching approximately 150 babies a year, seeing 15-25 clients a day, getting a paycheck every two weeks. Call days were marked clearly on the calendar. My kids (and husband) learned to not count on my presence on those days. They also learned that when off call (after at least three hours of sleep), I was all theirs. If I was on call for a birthday, we would schedule the party for an off call day. If I was actually home for dinner on an on-call day, we would eat the dinner my family had already planned and prepared .
For the last three years, I have been on call 24/7. As a private practice midwife with planned home birth clients, I am always on call. When I started this practice, my kids were basically grown, the youngest was 16. At this point in their lives, they are not overly upset if I cannot make a dinner party. And at 2 AM, when I shuffle home from a birth, they happily make room on the couch for a quick snuggle (and some Daily Show).
It was my choice to work this way, stepping away from midwifery for my babies’ early years, working as an employee in a group of midwives for my kids’ school years. It was the best choice I could make for myself and my family.
There are many other choices made by other midwives. Some chose to simultaneously have babies and an active practice, either in home or hospital. Midwives’ own babies are often brought to labor wards (or clients’ homes) to nurse quick before mom becomes midwife again. Some choose to put off baby-having for decades (or all together). Some midwives pick mothering over midwifery entirely, never returning to their chosen profession after their own delightful (and demanding) children appear.
My own choices between midwifery and mothering were hard. All midwives make decisions regarding personal and professional balance, some very different from my own. These other choices are just as valid and just as difficult. Mothering is hard work: your body, mind and soul are on the line every day. The work of midwifery is equally hard. Deciding to combine the work of midwifery and mothering, now that is really hard!
Blessings on any and all of us that are brave enough to work both as midwives and as mothers in the same lifetime.
~Michelle,
May all babies be born into loving hands